PSA: Tired of Twitterfeed intermittently working? Use Feedburner Socialize instead.

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Feedburner Socialize

For about 2 years now I've been using this 3rd party site, Twitterfeed, to auto tweet my blog posts to my Twitter account. On paper, the site looks great, but in practice, it works poorly and lacks certain features. It can only poll my blog every 30 minutes, at the most frequent setting, for new posts. Despite this setting, sometimes several hours go by after I post before it auto-Tweets the link. Additionally, sometimes it fails to do it at all.

When this happened today, around lunchtime, I finally decided to seek out an alternative. Little did I know that a far superior solution was sitting right in front of me this whole time, and I could have EASILY been using it.

Like many bloggers, I use Feedburner to re-host up my RSS feed for my site because of the greatly increased functionality and control it gives me over my RSS feed. You can do things such as insert code into each blog post (google ads, etc), get detailed analytics on your feed subscribers, and it gives you capabilities like PubSubHubBub.

A quick Google Search for "Twitterfeed Alternative" turned up this blog post from ThinkSplendid, which covered exactly what I was looking for. Apparently, and I did not know this, Feedburner has had the built-in capability of publishing blog post links/summaries to Twitter for some time now. You can find this functionality under the "Publicize" tab -> "Socialize" side-nav link. It does EXACTLY what Twitterfeed does, but with the added reliability of The Google™. What's even better: instead of polling my site every 30 minutes for new posts, it will post a Tweet whenever a new post shows up in my RSS feed - instantly - because my CMS, Squarespace, is PubHubSubBub compatible. Yes, I know this is a very first world problem to have, but it just made my Monday.

xkcd: Online Communities 2

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xkcd has updated their map of online communities

Caption: Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.

Any Domains That End in .ly Are In Danger

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From Ben Metcalfe:

The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

I would like to warn current and future owners of .ly domains of a concerning incident regarding the deletion of one of our prime domains ‘vb.ly’ by NIC.ly (the domain registry and controlling body for the Libyan domain space ‘.ly’).

In short:

The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue. We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.

This is deeply concerning for everyone, but especially .ly domain owners, because it sets a precedent that all websites running on a .ly domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law in order to maintain their domains. This is especially concerning for anyone running a url shortener or hosting user-generated content on a .ly domain.

You may also not know that since June 2010 .ly domains less than 4 characters long may no longer be registered by anyone who isn’t in Libya – which suggests there is tension around foreign owned, high-value, short .ly domains.

Sucks for Bit.ly

Just How Bad Is Flash On Android? This Bad.

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Ian Betteridge:

What does this demonstrate? Simply that the idea that Apple could simply magically put Flash on the iPad (which runs a processor in the same class as the Nexus One) is fantasy. Ignoring the broader reasons for Apple wanting to keep Flash off its platform, it’s clear that Flash is simply too processor-intensive to work properly on mobile-class processors as currently specified.

Go watch for yourself.